Posts tagged with FOREIGN AID

You are a health official in Uganda, and you’re watching a crisis unfold. Your people have long suffered from epidemics of sleeping sickness, one of Africa’s biggest killers. There is no vaccine and the only treatment is protracted and painful. Sleeping sickness, transmitted by the tsetse fly, is carried by cattle and also kills cattle, destroying the livelihoods of families who keep them.

A bond for treating malaria in Mozambique is already in the works.

There are two strains of sleeping sickness that affect humans; one is in West Africa and one in East Africa. Uganda is the only country that has them both. Worryingly, they are moving closer together as their cattle carriers move, and will likely meet in a decade. Once that happens, the disease will become even harder and more expensive to screen for and diagnose.

Their meeting can be prevented, and sleeping sickness can be controlled, by treating cattle and then periodically spraying them with an insecticide. But treating 3.5 million cattle, and then tracking them for smaller campaigns of re-spraying, would cost some $30 million. Uganda doesn’t have that money. So it will pay a lot more later — in money, in the lives of animals, and in human health and productivity.

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In 2000, patients rested in a hospital in Uganda after receiving an injection to treat sleeping sickness.Credit Lori Waselchuk for The New York Times

Governments and international aid donors sometimes like to call the work they do to improve people’s lives “investing.” Uganda’s problem is an example. In a figurative sense, treating those cattle is an investment — a very good one. A small amount of money put in now will bring large rewards later. Of course, it’s not literally an investment.

An Acehnese man lingers at the ruins of his home in Banda Aceh in 2005.Credit Kazuhiro Nogi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When the Indian Ocean tsunami hit in December 2004, killing more than a quarter-million people, the great global humanitarian machine sprung to life. First on the list of donations, of course, was food — bags of food began arriving by airlift and sea, especially into Aceh, the hardest-hit region.

By strengthening and not undercutting local farmers, cash aid helps countries to avoid hunger later.

But was it the right kind of aid? The Acehnese who lost their livelihoods needed food, but there was actually plenty of food to be bought. Indonesia’s foreign minister told the world not to send rice. The coast had been devastated, but not far inland life was normal— in fact, harvests had been excellent. What was disrupting the food market was not the tsunami, but the sacks of rice that were coming in. So many people were getting rice for free that local markets couldn’t sell it. Farmers were undercut and supply chains fell apart.

“It seemed counterproductive to ship in commodities and undermine local producers,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy for Oxfam America. “Shipping in food was doing more harm than good.”

So several aid organizations working locally decided to try something different. They bought local food to distribute to the people to whom they would have otherwise donated food. Save the Children and CARE gave those in need cash or vouchers they could use to get food the way they always had: by going to the market and buying it. Mercy Corps paid residents to clear debris. The Swiss Development Corporation provided cash grants to families hosting the displaced.Read more…

Many Americans feel that foreign assistance is like money poured down a rathole. The United States contributes more money every year — spending nearly a third of all global health aid — while tangible results in developing countries can be hard to see.

But the “rathole” argument is dead wrong. Indeed, this World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, provides a perfect opportunity to assess the results of our global health assistance efforts and to recognize the tremendous amount we have accomplished.

Child mortality has decreased to 7.6 million preventable deaths in 2010 from around 12 million in 1990. That’s nearly 12,000 lives saved every day largely because of improved sanitation and water systems and significant increases in vaccination levels for measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus and whooping cough. We have also made big strides on malaria, decreasing deaths to fewer than 1 million per year. The President’s Malaria Initiative — started by President George W. Bush in 2005 and a key part of President Obama’s Global Health Initiative — and a coordinated strategy of bed nets, indoor anti-mosquito spraying, preventive treatment of pregnant women and rapid testing and treatment is driving the number down even further. Read more…

Every discussion about foreign aid is a heated discussion. Readers of Tuesday’s column on a new idea for foreign aid — paying for outcomes instead of providing money in advance — had plenty of suggestions about how to fix foreign aid (or why to abandon it). But before we get to them, we should make sure we know what we’re talking about when we say “foreign aid.” “It would be better if the citizens understood that ‘foreign aid’ is a misnomer,” wrote Millie Bea of Washington (25).

Only a fraction of foreign aid is used for development in poor countries.

A few readers mentioned, correctly, that large sums in the foreign aid budget go directly to governments that Washington considers strategically important, regardless of their conduct (aid to Egypt under Hosni Mubarak is a good example of a questionable investment). It’s designed to reward, strengthen or even prop up those allies. Several readers singled out Israel, which gets a lot of American foreign aid despite its wealth, for strategic reasons. About a third of our foreign aid goes to security programs such as peacekeeping, de-mining or military training — and this figure doesn’t even include what the State Department spends on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Another seven percent of the foreign assistance budget is spent on humanitarian relief: digging out after disasters or helping refugees.Read more…

Americans want to help others, but they’re skeptical that foreign aid can do much good.

Americans have always vastly overestimated how much we spend on foreign aid. A 2010 survey asked Americans what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid. The median response was 25 percent. When asked what percentage would be appropriate, the answer was 10 percent. Polls going back at least a decade show similar responses. In fact, foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget

If Americans are asked whether they want to help bring health, water, education and other crucial resources to poor people around the world, they say yes, by overwhelming majorities. But Americans are skeptical that foreign aid accomplishes these things.Read more…